The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,69
out to her most loudly, smiling wryly from the final decades of black-and-white photography, a teenager standing before a Los Angeles bungalow, his swarthy skin rendered in tones of gray and darker gray, hands on his hips and an irresistible twinkle in his eye. This relic had been here since Araceli had started working for the Torres-Thompsons, when the old man was still coming to the house regularly, before he uttered the words that caused his banishment. What did you say, viejo? And where might I find you? Araceli remembered the looks of exasperation on the faces of Maureen and Scott when they discussed el viejo Torres in the kitchen one Saturday afternoon, and snippets of conversation: “What a jerk.” “What a dinosaur.”
Probably Maureen had not yet gotten around to removing el dinosaurio from this family gallery because he was on the bottom shelf, in a lesser spot in relation to the recent school pictures of the boys with eager smiles and moussed hair, and of Maureen herself holding the newborn and slippery Samantha while sitting up with exhausted ecstasy on a hospital bed. Maureen in the delivery room was on the shelf next to a recent shot of Samantha with a red bow in her thin hair and to the bronze-toned image of a woman with pinned-up hair and a giant curtain of a dress staring back from the Victorian era, the folds in the corners of her eyes suggesting she was Maureen’s grandmother or great-grandmother. Next there was a recent shot of Maureen’s mother, taken in a pine forest, a gray-haired woman in khaki shorts and hiking books, with a faint and uncharacteristic smile. This is the woman’s shelf: there are four generations of girls from Maureen’s family here. Araceli considered too, on the second shelf from the top, the wedding pictures of Scott and Maureen, including a shot of the couple laughing and bending their bodies in an expression of the kind of uncontainable hilarity that hadn’t been seen in the Torres-Thompson household for quite some time.
Of all these people, Araceli concluded, old man Torres was the only adult still alive and likely to live in a place reachable from Paseo Linda Bonita. They hadn’t yet purged the old man from the family, not completely—he was a resilient mexicano, apparently. If their parents don’t come back, I’ll take them to this old man’s house. Araceli would have to prepare herself for the worst contingency. She had been used to thinking this way once, her naturally pessimistic outlook had served her well in her single-woman bus journey to the border, and then through the sprint, hike, and crawl into California, and in the first few harrowing and lonely weeks in the United States. Those were days of important lessons, though the subsequent four years in this household on Paseo Linda Bonita had led her to the false belief that the world might still have sanctuaries where prosperity and predictability reigned. Standing here now in front of pictures of the absent and departed members of the Torres and Thompson clans, she realized she might soon have to start thinking like an immigrant, like a desperate woman on the highway uncertain where the asphalt and the invisible trails of carbon monoxide might take her.
Scott awoke on Charlotte Harris-Hayasaki’s couch, following a forty-eight-hour bacchanalia of popcorn, nachos, pizza, diet soft drinks, and power beverages consumed in front of Charlotte’s flat-screen TV and game console, fighting Persian armies and completing post routes to sinewy wide receivers. Charlotte listened to his complaints about his wife, she fed him munchies he consumed compulsively and without joy, and she nestled into a spot on her vinyl couch next to him, her leg and sometimes her shoulder touching his. She tried rubbing his neck: “You have to watch out for the carpal tunnel with these game controllers.” But she wasn’t able to stir those passions that begin below a man’s waist and reach, through circuits of nerve and muscle and irrationality, to moist lips and tongue. Instead, she had set free an inner boy.
To steal a few minutes of play here and there was one thing, Scott thought: to fully indulge your inner gamer was another. These games were meant to be played by the hour, the better to appreciate their narrative mazes, the overwrought art of their virtual stages. Now, in his second morning here, Scott continued his playing tour of Charlotte’s impressive and diverse collection, chipping onto the green at Pebble Beach to the